Meera Subramanian

Meera Subramanian | Visiting Faculty

Nonfiction

Meera Subramanian is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes narrative nonfiction about home in the personal and planetary sense, especially in a time of climate crisis. Her work has been published in Nature, The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, Inside Climate News, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others, and she is a contributing editor of Orion. She is the author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, which was short-listed for the Orion Book Award. Publishers’ Weekly gave it a starred review, and Kirkus Reviews called it “right thinking and accusatory in all the right places.” Her writing has also been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing, Believer, Beware: First-person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, Letters to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, and multiple editions of Best Women’s Travel Writing. She has more essays forthcoming in The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate and Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World (2023). 

Meera  is also a co-director of the Religion & Environment Story Project and in the past she was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, Fulbright-Nehru senior research fellow, board president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Based on a glacial moraine on the edge of the Atlantic, Meera is a perpetual wanderer who can't stop digging in the dirt to plant perennials and looking up in search of birds. You can find her at www.meerasub.org.

Thoughts on Workshop: Writing is not, except in rare moments of grace, an easy thing. But you enter into a writing workshop because you have found it a necessary thing. If you were the student asking, “Mr. Frost, should I go on writing?” and he said, “Well, see if you can stop,” your answer was an emphatic no. In the classroom, I aim to foster a space for the collective spirit of human and literary collaboration, a generative place where we can crowd-source the wisdom of writings that inspire and the insights of your fellow workshoppers. Together, we can help each individual unearth the joy and delight of getting on the page the thoughts, memories, and stories that are tumbling in your head. Our collaborative goal is to turn smoke into substance.

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